The Armada Legacy

Chapter Thirty-Two

Ben recoiled. For a moment he was dumbstruck. ‘What did you say?’ he asked. ‘Shot who?’

Before Ramirez could answer, Ben had clubbed him over the head with the gun. Ramirez tried to cover his face with his hands. ‘What woman did you shoot?’ Ben roared, so hard he felt blood rise up in his throat. Terror was gripping his whole body. He felt as if he was on fire.

‘I shot Serrato’s bitch of a wife!’ Ramirez screamed back. ‘You tell him it was me who killed Alicia!’

Ben stopped hitting him. Breathing hard and shaking with adrenaline, he kept the gun warily trained on the man and tried to make sense of what he was hearing. He was beginning to realise that he and his attacker, this determined maniac who’d very nearly succeeded in taking him down, and whom he’d been just about to beat to a bloody pulp, were totally at cross purposes. Who the hell was Serrato?

Ben tried to focus his thoughts. The mannequin in Cabeza’s study. The music playing in the tower, loud enough to be heard by anyone approaching the house. It had been a lure. This Nico Ramirez – if that was his real name – had set a trap for someone he’d known in advance was coming to see Cabeza. Whoever that someone was, he wasn’t coming to consult the historian on a matter of scholarship. And Ramirez obviously believed that he’d caught the would-be assassin.

‘Where’s Cabeza?’ Ben demanded, just a little more gently. ‘Is he alive?’ But he could see that his prisoner was barely in a state to answer the hundred questions he wanted to ask. Blood was pouring from his nose and forehead, and he was convulsing with cold as the first stages of acute hypothermia began to take hold. Ben’s own clothes were wet through from the freezing lake and he could feel his extremities beginning to lose sensation. He slung the machine carbine over his shoulder, reached into his jacket pocket for his whisky flask and fumbled with his numb fingers to unscrew the cap. He took a gulp of the stinging whisky and then thrust the flask at Ramirez. ‘Drink some,’ he commanded.

Ramirez took a shuddering sip, coughed, drank some more. Ben snatched the flask away and hauled him to his feet. ‘Now, hands above your head and move,’ he said. ‘That way,’ and pointed through the trees to the buildings near the lakeside.

Ben marched his shivering captive up the snowy bank towards the largest of the old buildings. As they trudged wearily through the trees he could see the old cottage had been derelict for a long time. ‘Inside,’ he snapped, shoving Ramirez through the half-collapsed doorway.

The place was littered with junk and debris. Judging from the rusted shotgun casings lying about, it had most recently been used as a hunter’s refuge by someone who’d been up here wildfowling on the lake in the summer or autumn, but it looked as though someone had lived here once. There was a crude stone chimney at one end, and the remains of a fire in the soot-blackened hearth. A broken-up rocking chair and a few mossy logs were all that was left of the firewood supply.

Ben made Ramirez sit on an upturned bucket in the corner with his hands still on his head, found some old newspapers in a box and got to work getting a blaze going. When it was crackling nicely, he let the shivering man move closer to the fire and ordered him to strip off his wet things.

Ramirez willingly obeyed. The shirt he was wearing was military issue, for extreme cold conditions. He’d obviously been prepared to wait up here a long time on the snowy mountain for whomever he intended to trap.

When Ramirez was down to his underwear, Ben tossed him an old blanket he’d found, dirty and mouldy but dry. Ramirez towelled himself vigorously until his skin was pink, then wrung out his wet things and hung them up close to the leaping, crackling flames. As his clothes steamed, he sat down with the blanket wrapped tightly around him and gingerly prodded his bloodied nose and mouth with a wince of pain.

‘You’ll live,’ Ben said. He was keeping the SIG machine carbine pointed at Ramirez with a round in the chamber and the safety off. Given a chance, he’d have liked to dry his own wet clothes by the fire and get warm. But this man was dangerous and there were too many potential weapons lying around to be off his guard with him even for a second.

He moved across to the fireplace, threw more broken pieces of wood and a log into the flames and then began frisking through Ramirez’s jacket for some identification. There was a wallet and a dripping wet passport. Ben examined them and saw that Ramirez hadn’t been lying about his name. His passport and personal identity card were marked ‘REPUBLICA DE COLOMBIA’; their owner Nicolás Ramirez had been born in 1974 in Bogotá. He was carrying a sheaf of fifty-thousand peso banknotes in among his thin supply of euros, as well as a much-creased and well-thumbed photo of a pretty woman with black hair and a white smile.

But the most interesting thing Ben found in the sodden wallet was the faded, tattered ID bearing the green badge of the Policía Nacional de Colombia, showing the rank of sergeant. The ID had expired seven years ago.

‘So what do I call you?’ Ben said. ‘Sergeant Ramirez?’

‘People call me Nico,’ the Colombian muttered.

‘Even people you try to kill?’ Ben said.

‘Whatever, asshole.’

‘All right, Nico,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s start over. My name’s Ben Hope. We’ll get to what a former Colombian police officer is doing running around the Spanish Sierra Nevada taking pot-shots at people with a machine carbine later. First you’re going to tell me where Cabeza is.’

Nico shot him a murderous look. ‘You can kill me. But you’ll never get him.’

‘I don’t want to kill you,’ Ben said. ‘Not unless I have to. But I might have to, if you don’t tell me what I want to know. So let’s have some answers. I came here to see Juan Fernando Cabeza. Instead I find you. Why?’

Nico spat on the ground between his feet. ‘Two words is all I have to say. Fuck. You.’

Without another word, Ben pointed the gun and pulled the trigger. The sound of the shot was harsh and painful in the enclosed space. The bullet cracked off the fireplace three inches to the left of Nico’s head.

Nico’s reaction to the shot was interesting. Ben had seen, and dealt with, a lot of wild and crazy guys in his life – the kind of guys who would snap out a defiant ‘fuck you’ looking death in the face in the form of a loaded and cocked military rifle. Some of those men genuinely hadn’t cared whether they lived or died, but Nico wasn’t one of them. Ben had seen something in his eyes as the gun went off. More than just the fear of dying: an infinite sadness that death should have caught up with him now, at this moment, in this place, in this way. Nico Ramirez desperately wanted to stay alive, for a reason that he alone knew very clearly.

‘Like I told you, Nico,’ Ben said, ‘not unless I have to. How this works out is all down to you. Let me ask you again. Where’s Cabeza?’

The defiant look was still there, but it was a little more tempered now. ‘Somewhere your boss Serrato ain’t ever gonna find him. Not if he sends a hundred men or a thousand.’

‘You’re getting it wrong,’ Ben said. ‘I don’t work for anyone called Serrato. I’ve never even heard of him. And I didn’t come here to hurt Cabeza.’

Nico gave a cynical grunt. ‘Sure. You’d tell me that.’

‘You could be lying too,’ Ben said. ‘How do I know Cabeza’s alive? Maybe you killed him.’

‘He’s alive, motherfucker.’

‘He’d better be.’

‘Alive and safe.’

‘So you’re protecting him? Why would you do that? Protecting him from whom?’

Nico said nothing.

‘Or maybe it’s not that you’re protecting Cabeza,’ Ben said, reading his face. ‘Maybe you’re just using him as bait. You knew someone was after him.’

Nico remained staunchly silent, but a flicker behind his frozen expression told Ben he was right. Seconds ticked slowly by and still Nico wouldn’t talk. Ben felt a molten ball of intermingled emotions rise up inside him, making him want to scream. ‘I need you to help me understand what’s going on here, Nico,’ he said, trying to keep his voice calm but hearing an edge of desperation in it. ‘I’m not working for anyone. I’m looking for a friend. More than a friend. They kidnapped her in Ireland, the day Roger Forsyte and his assistant were murdered. Do you know about them?’

‘I watch the news,’ Nico said. He was watching Ben intently, as if he knew more but was holding it carefully back.

‘I think Juan Cabeza might be able to help me find her,’ Ben explained. ‘I just want to talk to him. I don’t want to harm him. Far from it.’

Nico looked at him long and penetratingly.

‘Please,’ Ben said. ‘I have to get her back. She’s been missing for over two days. Her name is Brooke. Brooke Marcel. Somehow all this is connected, but I don’t know how and I don’t know where else to go.’

There was another long silence, during which Nico went on staring curiously at him, still apparently undecided as to whether he could believe him. Eventually he motioned at the weapon in Ben’s hands. ‘You tell me you need my help. But you’re the one holding the gun, amigo.’

Ben looked down at the SIG. Looked back up at Nico and saw the earnestness and the depth of pain in his eyes, and it suddenly struck him that it was like looking into a mirror. Without another thought he flipped the gun round and passed it to Nico, butt first, with the muzzle pointing back at his own chest. ‘There. Take it.’

Nico hefted the machine carbine in his hands and looked even more curiously at Ben.

‘Now you’re the one holding the gun,’ Ben said.